Your Local Search Checklist for 2012

The state of local search has been fast moving in 2011. Maybe not as fast as the fastest travelled smash in badminton – clocked at 332kph – but quick enough to blow your hat off and make you scramble to pick it back up.

With all the changes happening in Google Places, SEO, and social media, business owners are struggling to keep up with the pace of things in the digital world. I believe that the struggle comes from both understanding how local search works and prioritizing efforts to ensure their time and money is well spent.

I decided to put together a list of the core items that I think are important to get out of the way and make sure weâre tracking and refining our processes to help local business get found and make more money. What do you say? Sound like a plan? Here we go!

3 Primary Focuses of Local Search

There are three areas that search engines use data from to determine the best results for a query search. They can be categorized into the following:

Google Places

Off-Site/Off-Places

Website

One VERY IMPORTANT thing to keep in mind when doing local SEO is that you must have consistent contact information at every touch point on the web. This is called consistent NAP (Business Name, Address and Phone Number). Search engines aggregate data from multiple sources that relate back to your business profile on the web. So get it right the first time around, or youâll be pulling your hair out as you go back, making changes to your business information across a bunch of channels.

Google Places Checklist

Business Title

Are you using your business name as is or are you stuffing keywords in the title? (avoid the latter)

Physical Address

Have you added your physical address to your Places account?

Are you using the exact same physical address throughout? (TIP: have a copy of your address handy and copy/paste your address as is at other sources.)

Do you have a blog? â This is one easy way for a business to start adding content to their site. The benefits of a blog are: quicker indexation, more pages to target more keywords and creating trust with customers.

Website Checklist

Do your pages have specific local + keyword targeting? â If you are a Personal Injury Lawyer inOttawa, youâll want âOttawaâ along with your practice in all these areas.

If your business has more than one location, do you have a landing page for each? â Recommended that you have one for each city that your business is in. This increases the opportunity to target towns/suburbs that you may not be targeting if you were in a larger city.